Police say Scouts stayed mum on 1981 molestation allegations against a Loveland teacher and Scout leader. Four years later, Harry Howard was convicted of molesting one of his students.

Nov. 24, 2012

Harry Howard

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This photo from a Bill Reed Junior High School yearbook shows Harry Howard and a male student during one of the school's annual three-day camping excursions. / Courtesy of Bill Reed Middle School

Timeline of events

August 1972: Harry Howard is hired as a math teacher at Bill Reed Junior High School in Loveland. March 1981: Scout tells a Loveland youth advocate that Howard sexually assaulted him in 1978; troop council confronts Howard with accusations from up to five boys and asks him to resign from Scouting. April 1981: Howard resigns from Scouting, citing health concerns. November 1984: Two Bill Reed students file criminal complaints of sexual assault against Howard for alleged incidents in June 1981 and November 1984: He is immediately placed on suspension by the school district. January 1985: Howard is charged with three felony counts of sexual assault on a child. June 1985: Howard is convicted of one felony count of sexual assault on a child. August 1985: Howard is sentenced to 12 years in prison, but remains free pending appeal. April 1987: Colorado Court of Appeals grants Howard’s request for sentence reconsideration. November 1987: Colorado Supreme Court declines to hear Howard’s appeal of his conviction. January 1988: Howard is re-sentenced to eight years in prison and remanded to the Colorado Department of Corrections. August 1994: Howard is released from prison and returns to Fort Collins, where he continues to reside today. More online

Harry Howard poses with members of the Bill Reed Junior High School student council in this yearbook photo. At times during his tenure at the school, Howard served as the group's adviser. / Courtesy of Bill Reed Middle School

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Four men sat in a room in March 1981, ready to confront a respected junior high school math teacher and Boy Scout leader with a Scout’s allegations of sexual abuse extending back three years.

The meeting was convened after one Scout and his mother made specific allegations of sexual abuse against Scout adviser Harry Howard of Fort Collins to a trusted youth counselor, Paul Holdeman of Loveland.

“He told me they’d go on camping trips,” Holdeman told the Coloradoan. “There was always an uneven number (of Scouts), so one of the boys would have to stay in the tent with Mr. Howard.”

As many as five more boys were lined up to attest to similar encounters with Howard in his Scouting capacity.

The council of Boy Scout Troop 85 and Explorer Post 85 in Loveland found the claim sufficiently serious to immediately banish Howard from Scouting, a process that triggered a chain of correspondence all the way to the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America detailing the allegations of abuse.

Local, regional and national leaders of the Boy Scouts all were privy to details of the accusations against Howard and his removal from the organization, yet none alerted police.

Howard continued to teach at Bill Reed Junior High School in Loveland for four years, despite a Scout official’s recommendation that he not be allowed one-on-one contact with students. But the consequences of the Boy Scouts’ silence to police and a school district administrator’s inaction came to roost in 1984, when Howard was convicted of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust for molesting one of his students.

A pattern of abuse

Howard’s story is painfully common. It repeated itself in all 50 states, exposing countless victims to abusers over the course of decades. The Los Angeles Times last month released a database of about 5,000 suspected abusers known to the Boy Scouts of America, including Howard.

The Boy Scouts maintained dossiers dubbed “perversion files” to compile a blacklist aimed at keeping dangerous adults away from Scouts. But in many cases the Boy Scouts did nothing to protect children outside its circle of membership from grownups such as Howard whose proclivities were known to the organization.

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When he confronted Howard, Holdeman was joined by the Rev. Don Mitchell of Mountain View Presbyterian Church which chartered the Scout troop, Loveland lawyer Bill Kaufman who represented the troop’s legal interests, and regional Scouting supervisor Bob Gentry, a Greeley physician who prepared the report on Howard to be sent to the Boy Scouts’ national headquarters.

Representatives of the troop told Howard the circumstances demanded his immediate resignation from Scouting, and assured him they “would not discuss the matter with anyone,” according to the file. Howard declined an offer to meet face-to-face with his accuser about the allegations, “and as Harry left the room, his last words quickly spoken over his shoulder were, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” Gentry wrote.

Howard’s perversion file illustrates both Scouting’s urgency to remove threats from its ranks, and its reluctance to warn the outside world about potential predators’ access to children. It wasn’t until 2003 that Boy Scouts made mandatory the reporting of allegations of child abuse against its members.

One day after the meeting, word somehow had reached the administration of Thompson R2-J School District, which reportedly inquired about Howard with troop leaders.

“Rev. Mitchell informed me that the superintendent of schools had called him to see if there was any need for the schools to follow up in any official act,” Gentry wrote in Howard’s perversion file. “Rev. Mitchell said there was no substantial evidence to follow through on, so no follow up was necessary. However, it was recommended that Harry not be put in any situation where he will be in a one-on-one situation with young people.”

Howard continued to teach math at Bill Reed, where he had been employed since 1972, until late 1984, when two students accused him of fondling them at school.

The investigation of Harry Howard

Al Sharon, now a captain with the Brighton Police Department, was the lead investigator for the Loveland Police Department in the criminal case against Howard. Sharon spent seven years investigating sex crimes against children in Loveland, and Howard’s case is fresh in his memory.

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So he was astonished to learn from a reporter’s phone call almost three decades later what the Boy Scouts knew about Howard three years before he began his investigation.

“The Boy Scouts never made a whisper,” Sharon said. “The Boy Scouts never surfaced. I’m shocked to find that out. They never said anything about it to me.”

Charges of felony sexual assault on a child were filed against Howard in January 1985, after Sharon built cases against Howard for three alleged incidents of abuse involving two of his teacher’s aides in June 1981 and November 1984 — both after Scout leaders forced Howard out. Ultimately, the prosecution gained a conviction on just one of the three counts of sexual assault on a child.

Howard’s accusers in the criminal case each said Howard subjected them to multiple sexual acts over long spans of time. Sharon said the boys Howard targeted tended to be outcasts who shared characteristics that made them vulnerable to abuse and susceptible to questionable credibility on the witness stand.

They were skinny. They were awkward. Classmates thought of them as misfits, and they had poor self-images. Father figures were absent from their lives.

“He needed a friend, and this is the guy that showed up,” Sharon said, referring to one of Howard’s accusers. “He was preyed upon.”

Sharon lamented that timely reporting by the Boy Scouts could have averted victimization of the students.

“I’m not sure if they’re morally guilty, but there certainly is moral responsibility,” he said.

The court allowed evidence of similar transactions by Howard at his trial, including testimony by a third teacher’s aide, already in college by then, who testified that Howard had molested him during the late 1970s.

“The indoctrination part happened in the classroom, then later on to include sex acts on camping trips in tents, one-on-one,” Sharon said.

Sharon said in part due to that testimony, one of the charges against Howard stuck. Convincing a jury that a longtime teacher with a good reputation was guilty of violating children in his care was not easy.

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“Harry Howard was the president of the school district credit union,” Sharon said. “He was also the senior teacher at Bill Reed Junior High School and a prominent member of the community. I had dozens of people call me to tell me what a Nazi I was, and ask how could I accuse this fine man of such bad acts.”

During his time as a detective investigating sexual abuse of children, Sharon said he encountered many perpetrators who projected positive public images comparable to Howard’s.

“Child molesters of this sort, they give the appearance of being ordinary people,” he said. “They don’t look like they live under a bridge. They’re not flashers. They’re nice people. They tend to work around children. They adopt a persona. They’re good to kids, and kids like them. Harry Howard was very skilled at this.”

Like many who knew Howard, administrators at Bill Reed Junior High School initially were stunned by the accusations.

“They about fell out of their chairs,” Sharon said. “They said, ‘He’s a pillar of the community.’ ”

But where the Boy Scouts hushed up, the school’s leaders stood up, according to Sharon. The school district immediately placed Howard on suspension in November 1984. The school’s principal and assistant principal took the allegations seriously enough to help steer Sharon to one of the boys who filed a criminal complaint against Howard.

“They were outstanding people with high integrity,” Sharon said. “Their No. 1 concern was the safety of their students, not the reputation of the district.”

Holdeman, who first heard a Scout’s allegations against Howard, is now 88. He was not involved in Scouting and said he has no allegiance to the organization. He maintains that the men who could have spoken up about the allegations against Howard in 1981 were hamstrung by his Scout accuser’s reluctance to press charges.

“I told the boy and his mother who came to me that if they didn’t want to testify, that leaves him free to do that again,” Holdeman said. “I felt like our hands were tied if the family wasn’t willing to testify. I felt like given what we had, we did the best we could. Looking back at it, maybe we didn’t go as far as we could have. I’ve always felt good about what we did, that we took it as far as we did.”

Howard fought the charges against him with zeal. Dozens of character witnesses were endorsed by the defense, although just two were allowed to testify at trial. His lawyers made repeated fruitless attempts to admit results of a lie-detector test that supported Howard’s claims of innocence. Sharon contends the unreliable nature of polygraph tests is why they remain inadmissible in court.

Howard took the stand on his own behalf to profess that he had not committed the crime. It didn’t convince the jury. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but the sentence was trimmed to eight years on appeal. Howard will remain a registered sex offender for the rest of his life.

Howard served six years and seven months, most of it at Territorial Prison in Canon City, where he was a model inmate who tutored other prisoners in math and participated in religious activities, according to Colorado Department of Corrections records. The lone strike against him in a multitude of prison behavior reports was his persistent denial that he had committed the crime.

'A public justice'

Now 82 and suffering from dementia, Howard is unable to speak for himself about the matter. His wife, Juanita Howard, spoke to The Coloradoan on his behalf.

Time has dulled her memory in some regards. She denies that her husband ever was the subject of molestation allegations during his time in Scouting, and claims that high blood pressure forced him to leave the organization. However, Howard’s perversion file explicitly states that Mrs. Howard took part in at least one conversation with troop leaders about the accusations against her husband.

She still maintains that her husband never molested anyone.

“He served time for something that he didn’t do,” Mrs. Howard said.

District Judge John-David Sullivan, who sentenced Howard, was convinced otherwise. At sentencing, he confronted Howard with the chilling fear his accusers exhibited during their testimony, a byproduct of the damage the judge said Howard inflicted on them. The judge also emphasized that the fondling he was convicted of committing paled beside the explicit acts that past victims had described on the witness stand.

“The defendant has violated the children’s trust, the parents’ trust and society’s trust,” Sullivan said. “He has caused harm to our school system. Justice for such crimes must be a public justice, not a private one.”